Ultorg: A General-Purpose User Interface for Relational Databases (2020) [video]

Also of interest, an article from the research project on which Ultorg is based:

Expressive Query Construction through Direct Manipulation of Nested Relational Results

http://people.csail.mit.edu/ebakke/research/sieuferd_sigmod2... (PDF)

The part of the demo where he creates a computed field inside the sub-result (in a hierarchy), and then uses that in an aggregate at the next level above is excellent. And then he can still see the constituent rows contributing to the aggregate and continue adding filters on them.

I am sold, even as someone comfortable with writing complex queries.

Anyone here nostalgic for Dabble DB? That's probably the first thing that came to my mind when I saw this.

This makes a lot of sense. In my tinkering with what a radically clarified form of programming would look like, I've come to believe that any such effort would have to be built around a database at its core. Personally, I think graph databases are a more intuitive fit for how we think about objects and their relationships to each other, but relational dbs are pretty close too.

Seems very much needed. Direct access to production databases with current tools is clearly not safe.

Just skipped to the middle of that video and see the other 3 participants are pretty weird. They are constantly holding big smiles with their teeth showing. That can't be real.